CAFTA

CAFTA -- (House of Representatives - June 22, 2005)

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Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the author of a book on fair trade, and my colleagues, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), for joining us this evening.

I want to focus for a few minutes on the important issue of agriculture. And the new trade ambassador who happens to be from Ohio claims that our agricultural exports to Central America are going to increase by $1.5 billion, or almost double our exports, to the region as a result of CAFTA. But you know what, that is what they told us when we debated NAFTA. They said that we were going to increase agricultural exports.

Let us look at the record. The record shows with Mexico we are dead even. It did not make any difference. And with Canada we have fallen over $4.3 billion into the hole. We were promised by the former trade ambassadors we would get more food-processing jobs, and that sounded like a good thing back in the early 1990s.

They told us we would get 54,000 new food-processing jobs. Guess what? We did not get a single one. In fact, we lost 16,000 food-processing jobs in this country. Even Brachs Candy is locking up their doors in Chicago and moving south. Same thing in my district, Spangler's Candy.

NAFTA boosters said to us, oh, farm cash receipts are going to go up by 3 percent a year. Guess what? They have gone down by that amount. And net farm income during the NAFTA period has gone down by nearly 10 percent from $52.7 billion to $47 billion. So NAFTA's legacy for farmers in America is declining prices, and they know it: shrinking revenues, shrinking markets, and rising debt burdens. And now the same people who gave us NAFTA want to give us CAFTA, the same group.

And what did the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) say, if you keep making the same mistake over and over again, it is a sign of insanity.

I agree with the gentleman 100 percent on that. In fact, the food consumption power of consumer markets in CAFTA countries is exaggerated. We already hold an $812 billion deficit in agricultural products with the CAFTA countries. Already we are in the hole. With NAFTA and Mexico, we were almost even. We were in debt a little bit with Canada, and it has gone completely south.

We know CAFTA will mean more sugar imports into our country. We also know in one of the most important areas which hardly anybody has talked about, in ethanol production which is a brand-new market for our country. We have got about 54 ethanol plants in this country right now. A Corn Belt State like Ohio would benefit enormously from some of the new energy legislation we are working on in the Congress.

But what CAFTA would do is, guess what, it would open up exports from Argentina and from Central American countries of ethanol-based products, including ethanol made from sugar into our market. So in the same ways we are becoming and have become totally addicted to imported petroleum, now we will get addicted to ethanol by imports through agreements like CAFTA, rather than finding a way to help our farmers bring those markets up in this country.

Minnesota is really leading the way. I love the people of Minnesota, the farmers of Minnesota. I just wish I could do for America what they have done for Minnesota in the area of ethanol production.

So when we look at this CAFTA agreement, and I know time is limited this evening, I just wanted to come down here and say if we had a decent renewable fuel standard that would require an 8 billion gallon reserve, what we could do for real farm income, not subsidy income, but real farm income in the entire Corn Belt region, in the sugar beet region of this country, in the cane sugar region, all these areas of our country where we could really make a difference. Wow, what we could do here at home.

I just think CAFTA is a bad deal. I think we should learn from the past. And agricultural America knows it is a bad deal. The only people who are supporting this are some of the brokering companies. Whether they get their product in China or whether they get it in Argentina or in the United States, these transnationals, they really do not care. They just want to trade on the backs of those who are actually doing the work.

We should care about the American people. We should care about the farmers in our fields. We should care about those people who are working in our processing companies and keep that production here.

Mr. FARR. The gentlewoman and I are both on the Subcommittee on Agriculture of the Committee on Appropriations, and I cannot think of two people that fight more for small farms and the ability of rural America to have a successful economic development.

I am wondering if the gentlewoman is finding in Ohio, in the people the gentlewoman has run across, most of the agricultural trade associations are supporting CAFTA. As I run into the members of those associations, they are not so keen on it. They are very concerned. They think that these are agrarian countries, and so what is going to happen is the products that they grow and can get into the school lunch program, can get into the organic program, can get into essentially the multi-billion dollars that America spends on food for the military and food for food stamps and things like that, that these products will be produced not at the local farmers market and additional farmers markets; but these products will come from Central America, at the expense of small farmers in our country, particularly of speciality crops.

Ms. KAPTUR. I think the gentleman has raised an excellent point. I think the Washington trade groups are totally out of touch with their members at the local level.

I have had farmers say to me when we were debating the NAFTA agreement, why should we let bell peppers come in from countries that do not have environmental regulations like we do? Bell peppers coming in with DDT, when DDT was being banned in Ohio. They were not competing on a level playing field. They were on a different field. They would go down to these towns. You cannot even call them towns. Little dusty villages in Mexico where these bell peppers were grown. And the farmers would say, I have been going down there for 20, 30 years. They do not even have an asphalt road yet.

So the whole system of life was different, and they were being asked to compete with a country that really did not allow its farmers to earn more by virtue of the hard work that they did. They respect the people of Mexico, but they knew the system was rigged against them. They said, just give us a level playing field.

Mr. FARR. I think the difficult is, and we all agree on this, that you cannot just have these trade agreements which are private business contracts and expect the social responsibility of both sides of the agreement are going to raise those opportunities for people who are less educated, for people who are below living standards.

It has got to be a totality. If we are going to trade ideas and products, we have also got to trade in education. We have got to trade in social responsibility and minimum standards, minimum wages, minimum protection for labor, minimum protection for environment. The whole quality of life has to improve.

This is the most giant business deal that the United States will ever make. And it is tragic that in this giant business deal we are not dealing with all of these other issues that we came here to Congress to try and solve.

Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman for his comments on that. I think the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr) is exactly right and he understands how one has to have integrated policies.

I wanted to say as I am looking at the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) who has fought so hard for people to build a real middle class in this country and to help other nations help their people create a middle class, what is really sad about these trade agreements is it pits the poor against the more poor. It draws our living standards down. But one farmer that I met in Mexico said to me, what is really upsetting is that we feel like crabs in a bucket.

Every time we try to get up a little bit, somebody else pulls us down, and they were fighting this rush to the bottom, which is the expression that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) uses so well. One poor person pulling another person down, rather than having the standards that the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr) is talking about, where we all agree to a minimum standard. We bring people up, not pull them down.

Ms. WATERS. I think you are so right, and I thank you so very much for the leadership you have provided on these issues. I thank you for opening up opportunities for women to go down to Mexico and take a look at what is going on there. It is because of you that a lot of people in this Congress have become interested in this issue, and I appreciate the work you have done.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for saying that. Also, 60 percent of those people who are employed in these Central American countries are women. They are working in banana companies trying to pack these crates, 40, 50, 60 crates an hour. They are being forced to make men's trousers, 400 to 600 pairs an hour, and they have to work 2 weeks to afford 2 pairs of slacks down there, which costs $39.40, and yet, they are making 400 to 600 pairs of trousers an hour.

What kind of a continent, what kind of a world are we creating when we pay so little heed to those who work so hard for so little and then we put our workers out, largely women workers in the textile industry in this country, where we farmed out those jobs in places like North Carolina, South Carolina, are hollowing out of this production? At least they were in the middle class. They had finally made it to the middle class. What are we doing in this country?

Ms. WATERS. It could not have been better stated.

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